Maximizing Sustainability in Manufacturing

Ensuring your firm is sustainable will save you money, improve your operational efficiency, and help you attract eco-friendly consumers. This sentiment is echoed by research collected by McKinsey, which shows that firms that achieve lofty ESG targets routinely deliver higher returns for stakeholders. 

Adopting a more eco-friendly approach is easier today than ever before, too. Modern manufacturers can use materials like hyper-branched polymers to coat goods. Sustainable alternatives like hyper-branched polymers are highly resistant to abrasions and will not corrode quickly. 

Embracing more eco-friendly operations can help you make headway towards your ESG goals. For example, if you’ve previously relied on carbon credits to offset your emissions, you may want to pivot towards even more eco-friendly production methods to further reduce your pollution and minimize waste. 

Renewable Energy

Adopting renewable energy is the most impactful change you can make as a manufacturer. Pivoting away from power systems that rely on gas, oil, and coal will significantly reduce your emissions and help you run a more eco-friendly firm. Exploring alternative energy sources can help you move away from carbon credits, which have received negative press in recent years due to double-counting and their relative effectiveness. When moving away from carbon credits, consider options like: 

• Supply Chain: Responsible sourcing is an easy way to cut down your upstream emissions. Look for suppliers that foreground their social responsibility at this stage, too, as you can use these facts to promote yourself as a socially responsible, eco-friendly brand. 
• Purchase Renewables: Depending on your location, buying solar panels and power may be an efficient way to cut down your energy bill while protecting the environment. If solar isn’t viable, look into partnering with eco-friendly suppliers who source their energy from renewable sources. 
• Building Footprints: Your facility's carbon footprint can spiral out of control if you don’t monitor and reduce energy using smart devices like automated temperature control and smart lights. You can also encourage more people to work from home or on a hybrid basis to reduce carbon-related emissions. 

These operational changes will greatly improve your energy efficiency and will help you pivot away from carbon-intensive suppliers. Strategies like purchasing renewables may reduce your costs. This is crucial in today’s increasingly unpredictable world, where global conflict has caused energy prices to spike and has reinforced the importance of switching to reliable renewables. 

Pivoting away from carbon credits will bolster your resilience as a manufacturer and help future-proof your firm. Consequently, you won’t be forced to catch up when heavy-handed regulatory changes and legislation require manufacturers to become more eco-friendly. 

Waste Management

Manufacturing innately produces waste. However, limiting the amount of waste you produce is vital if you want to brand yourself as an eco-friendly business. Fortunately, tracking and minimizing your waste is easier today than ever before. 

If you’re looking for a case study to draw inspiration from, consider looking towards Pilot Chemical. Pilot Chemical recently started tracking key sustainability metrics related to waste and announced an impressive goal to reduce their hazardous material production by 50% before 2030. Keeping track of waste is crucial when setting these ESG goals, as metrics motivate decision-makers to prioritize sustainability as well as profitability. 

You can further reduce waste by tracking and minimizing the amount of non-recyclable packaging that you send to customers and clients. Packaging creates a massive amount of preventable waste every year, yet many firms do not take steps to reduce the impact that their plastic wrap, containers, and shipping boxes create. 

Today, you can use eco-friendly packaging options to minimize downstream waste. These options still offer the same security and storage options but are made from polymers that are easily recycled and result in less waste. 

This data-driven approach to ESG may help you identify operational inefficiencies, too. For example, if a sustainability report reveals that you use excessive amounts of water during production, you may be able to tweak your approach and adopt more efficient methods.

Preventative Practices

Manufacturing can be hard on the machines and tools that you use to produce your product. Over time, drill bits wear down and otherwise reliable equipment develops faults. Rather than replacing equipment — which incurs a heavy emissions cost and produces waste—consider adopting preventive practices that make your parts last longer. Well-established equipment longevity best practices include: 

• Maintain: How much time do your tools spend in maintenance? Do you regularly clean, lubricate, and repair parts? What metrics do you use to identify when a machine may need servicing?
• Training: Misuse by employees will cause parts to wear out quickly and directly damage your equipment. Rather than assuming all employees know how to properly work equipment, invest in re-training and refreshment courses to ensure everyone is following best practices. 
• Address Issues: It’s easy to put off repairs and replacements when equipment is still functioning despite a known fault. However, this approach will only lead to catastrophic failures down the line that will produce waste and undermine your ESG targets. 

Proactively repairing and maintaining equipment may incur higher running costs and occasionally interrupt your production plan. However, taking affirmative steps to preserve and maintain your tools and parts will pay off in the long run. This will minimize the waste that your firm produces and will increase the efficiency of the equipment that you currently utilize. 

Conclusion

Maximizing sustainability in manufacturing can help you build a reputation as a business that foregrounds sustainability and achieves its ESG goals. This can be transformative if you work in an industry where customers or clients care deeply about sustainability and are willing to pay more for a product that has lower emissions and reduced waste. 

However, before you start pitching yourself as a green alternative, you need to start tracking key ESG metrics like water waste and emissions. This will give you clear goals to aim for and will motivate decision-makers who would otherwise prioritize short-term profits over long-term aims. Tracking ESG data points can help you spot faults and pivot toward more efficient operations. This improves your profitability in the long run and future-proofs your firm.